


Contemplating Madness

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Character Study, Crossover, Daemons, Gen, JJ breaking the inter-team profiling rule, One-Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 11:01:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6003337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, JJ feels as see-through as her dæmon's wings, the both of them easily blown off track by uncaring winds.</p>
<p>She finds over time that the people around her are just as vulnerable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contemplating Madness

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Everything I Never Knew](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5102483) by [Deejaymil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil). 



> For those who are unfamiliar with the His Dark Materials universe, this is basically all you need to know (taken from the wiki)
> 
> **"A dæmon /ˈdiːmən/ is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech—regardless of the form they take—and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons and their humans are almost always of different genders."**

When JJ was a teenager, one of her friends told her that she could tell what a person was like in bed simply by looking at them. JJ didn’t believe that anyone could be that observant. Besides, it wasn’t that interesting to think about. It was three years after Rosaline, and JJ was more concerned with seeing other things in people: the secret thoughts that they held close to themselves and only looked at when no one was watching them, like their fears and the things that would break them. The last two were particularly important, because if she worked out how to see those, she could save them before they shattered.

Kailo said she was being silly. He’d dance around as a flickering yellow jewel with incandescent wings making shadow patterns on the roof as he told her that she couldn’t save everyone and that she’d burn herself out if she tried. Curled on the bed that was a twin for the empty one up the hall, she’d half thought that if she ever loved someone again as much as she’d loved her sister, burning herself to save them wouldn’t matter. She’d light the match herself and revel in the flames.

Later, she found herself thinking back to that friend and that comment and apologising, because, as it turned out, she’d been somewhat right.

**…**

She made a family accidentally. She hadn’t meant to, hadn’t wanted to, but they’d slipped under her defences until she’d woken up one morning and realized with a faint whisper of fear that she couldn’t bear to miss them.

Spence was the first to sneak into her heart. He was annoying, until he wasn’t, and ridiculously over-the-top awkward, until she realized that that was a shield for his vulnerabilities. His hare was mouthy and never shut up that was weird, until one day she saw a man look straight past him as though he wasn’t there. He wanted to be overlooked, his bearing said. He stood like he didn’t want to be noticed, every pore oozing with _I’m unimportant, don’t pay any attention to me._

If it wasn’t for Aureilo, she’d have believed it. Aureilo was the part of him that refused to be ignored, and he was impossible to lose.

He was the first she tried to profile as well. She knew his loves, he wore them on his sleeves. If he loved something he loved it passionately and audibly, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t get their ears talked off about his newest passion or hobby, all complex, all beyond them. People he loved in a gentler way, frightened of their rejection, but it was still visible. He loved Morgan with the giddy awe of the younger brother and he loved Elle with a wary caution. JJ knew he loved her too, because he smiled when he walked into the room and he was always the first to ask her how she was feeling, even if he knew the answer and even if his day was worse than hers. He loved Gideon and they’d never speak of that because it was too raw for words. She thought he might love Hotch, but after Gideon he’d never admit it. He lost all caution with loving Emily, and that ended with him on her couch for ten weeks, resisting being seduced by the promise of oblivion.

She tried to work out his fears. At first, she thought maybe it was dying, because every time a victim died his thoughts would turn inward. He’d look at his dæmon and speak to no one. It quickly became apparent that it wasn’t dying that scared him.

It was living.

He was the first to take off his vest, the first to throw himself in the firing line, and she realized one day that he intended to be the first to be lost. She might love them now but he’d loved them first, and he wasn’t going to watch one of them be hurt when he could bleed for them. It was terrifying and horrifying and Kailo gasped with the pain of the thought of burying him. So, they dragged him out of his grave over and over again because that was their job, and he determinedly continued pacing around the edges of it with an expression that hungered to know what it felt like within. She knew that one day they’d bury him and his intellect and a gold coin depicting his hare, because Spencer Reid was nothing if not placidly determined to get his own way, but for now she held the idea of him close and gave him as many reasons as she could to stay.

She thought of what he’d be like in bed, quickly deciding that she didn’t want to know. Someone with as much potential for love as he had would come apart too easily when driven to the edge of desire.

**…**

Elle was the first person JJ had failed since she was eleven and her sister had cut herself open in a torrent of red and gold on the bathroom floor. Elle with her ferret dæmon that complimented every part of her; both keenly vicious, both wildly cunning, and both with the tenacious ability to wriggle their way out of any danger. When she was fierce, Arlo was as well, and when she was thoughtful, he’d curl around her neck and breathe with her heartbeat. He didn’t stay out of the firing line in the field. When Elle pulled her weapon, Arlo was at her heels dancing with barely restrained glee and facing down dæmons five times his size.

She had a hair-trigger temper in the field, and when JJ allowed herself the sly thought of what she’d be like in bed, she imagined she’d have a hair-trigger in there too. She caught Elle watching Spence once as the taller profiler tried to explain something complicated to Morgan, and there was a pensive kind of hunger around Elle’s lips and eyes that JJ drew back from. She thought maybe they’d slept together. She thought maybe Spence had gone to Elle one night and found more than just friendship waiting. The thought made her feel slightly uneasy, and so she drew back and let Elle burn, making a choice between a hare and ferret and choosing which would leave unscathed.

All because Elle was a fire-cracker with an uncertain fuse that Randall Garner had lit and left to burn, and JJ didn’t want Spence anywhere near her when that line finally ran out. When it did, it took a man with it and left behind new lines on Hotch’s face along with a gun on his desk.

**…**

Gideon was next, and JJ had never been able to profile him and she wasn’t about to start now when she could see shadows beginning to eat away at his edges. His hawk was no help; Houlihan was nothing but sleek feathers and a blank gaze and he gave her nothing to work with.

She hoped they found what they were looking for when they left, but she doubted they even knew what that was.

**…**

She was there when he killed Foyet. She took Jack and Arelys out of that room and that nightmare, but she never forgot what Hotch looked like when he was covered in a man’s blood and hungry for more. She never forgot what he was capable of when pressed, or how she suspected he’d do the same for any of them if given the chance.

Halaimon was big and she was intimidating and she wasn’t everything that people expected her to be. JJ had never noticed, never thought to see, but Reid did and one day he’d pointed out that Hal was only half a wolf in the kind of voice you’d use to discuss the weather. JJ considered that she’d missed that, so it was very likely that she’d missed so much more about the man.

Like how after Haley, he flirted with the idea of death with one foot in the door and one foot out, looking back at Jack as though his son was the only thing tethering him to life. Jack was the thing that Hotch held close and secret. After Henry was born, JJ understood this a lot more. It was frightening to have something you loved so much in such a fragile creature as a child. Even more frightening when you knew intimately how many different ways you were capable of failing that child.

Aaron had a dæmon trapped between two worlds, but he stayed late every night and only reluctantly went home. Sometimes, she’d go past his office and he’d have his head in his hands, and Jack’s photo flat on the desk, and she wondered how long he could deal with the weight of the failures he heaped on himself. She wondered when he’d stop dealing with them.

Hal didn’t let people close and Hotch didn’t know how, and JJ knew this would eventually be the end of both of them.

**…**

She almost shot Emily once.

Spence was missing and the snarls of dogs were still echoing in her head, and she’d spun around with her weapon in her hands and almost put a bullet between Emily Prentiss’s perfectly groomed eyebrows. Emily hadn’t flinched. Neither had her dæmon, both watching JJ with identical, catlike gazes. That never really changed. Emily rarely balked at anything, and in the entire time JJ knew her, she was only sometimes rattled.

She killed Emily once.

She’d stood by her hospital bed and looked down on the woman who’d become her friend and told her that she had to die; all while Kailo and Sergio huddled together on the floor and whispered promises to each other that their humans knew they might not be able to follow up on. Out of all of them, she knew Emily the best and feared her the least, because while Spence craved death and Hotch flirted with it, Emily had taken Death by the hand and shown him the door.

“Come back to us,” Kailo had begged as they sent Emily away to die, just for a little while.

“Always,” promised Sergio, and they did.

Then JJ had gone out to tell her family that Emily, their Emily, had died under a cold knife and uncaring eyes, and she wasn’t surprised that lying came so easily to her because butterflies were known for undergoing metamorphosis. When before she’d been loyal, now she was a liar, and she wasn’t overly surprised with how easy the transition between had been.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye,” Reid said brokenly, and she almost laughed at him then and brought it all crashing down, because he was supposed to be the smartest there, so didn’t he know that that wasn’t at all how it worked?

She’d never gotten to say goodbye either, to any of them.

**…**

Eris made jokes and pulled pranks because Rossi wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He had to be firm and professional, especially at first when he was filling Gideon’s shoes and feeling the pinch around his toes. The only time he smiled was when his eagle owl finally managed to hit someone with a carefully aimed pen, or the time she’d switched the salt and the sugar and made Reid sneeze coffee. It was childish. It was mundane. It was wonderful.

JJ couldn’t remember a time without him.

He came when their weird little family was falling apart, with Reid hiding his arm under layers of unseasonably warm clothes and Emily facing Hotch’s scrutiny and Gideon chasing his own ghosts. Rossi came, and he pulled them back together.

She didn’t want to think of him having fears because he’d become their foundation, him and Hotch, and a building was only as strong as its base was. There was nothing vulnerable about the man or his owl with the wingspan as wide as their arms, and so she let herself think him unshakable. It worked, for a while.

**…**

Garcia had a magpie and she decorated the little corner of her universe with trinkets and baubles to hide herself away from the horrors of their work. JJ knew there was probably levels to it she was ignoring, but she liked to think that it was as simple a reason as ‘just because’.

When everyone else around her seemed to be coloured increasingly with shades of grey, Garcia was a comforting reminder that for some people, things could still be simple and good.

**…**

Morgan was handsome, and his dæmon boxer was too. JJ had seen them both work a dancefloor just as easily as they did a profile. They were sleek and charming, and when they’d both turn that charm onto her and smile disarmingly, she knew the temptation. But she’d also seen him take home dozens of women, and she knew that Morgan looked at his future and saw Gideon two point oh—forever chasing his tail and looking for something that stayed resolutely hidden. She knew his fears because, before Will and before Henry, they were hers too. She knew his worst fears more intimately, because they were still hers, and she knew that he dreamed of gravestones and their colleagues growing cold and still just as much as she did.

After Emily, he never trusted her the same. JJ didn’t really blame him.

After Rosaline, she’d never trusted herself either.

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


End file.
